This place doesn’t get a ton of posts these days (I don’t think the extremely aggressive post flood control helps in that regard), but there’s still plenty of stuff going on here. Eternal 1.2 development remains ongoing. At this point, the graphics pretty much seem to be finished, so the main further modifications to the game seem to be debugging some problems with the plugins and refining the maps to perfection (or as close as we can attain). Where Monsters Are in Dreams still seems to be progressing nicely, though the development isn’t as public-facing as many of the other projects’ are. Tario Saga also looks pretty cool. Marathon 1 Redux is a really cool attempt to reimagine the first game, though it’s slowed down for the time being as Lia’s schedule is a bit busier now. I’ve got my own scenario which I’m still plugging away at, though it’s nowhere near finished (nonetheless, it’s still possible to play it from start to finish); I’m trying to keep development as open-source as possible. I’m also working to build YouTube’s largest library of vidmaster films; I’ve probably got at least 650 publicly visible videos by now. I’m still having trouble getting SheepShaver to run Marathon properly, so no M1 content yet (it loads and runs fine for a bit, but it soft-locks after a few minutes, and I haven’t gotten sound to work yet); I hope to get that fixed this month. Alex Bolton (Phoenix creator) also has his own YouTube channel where he’s played through most of his own levels, though he doesn’t seem to have posted anything in awhile.

In case you’ve missed some content links, the Bungie.org Archives (the first major repository) and Simplici7y (the most recent repository) still seem to be more or less intact. Fileball, the second major repository, no longer exists in its original form, but Hopper and Wrkncacnter have both hosted archives of it, and the underlying files are also available.

Hope some of this is of interest. In any case, welcome.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

The Man wrote:(I don’t think the extremely aggressive post flood control helps in that regard)

I TL;DR 90% of your posts. If you'd take some extra time and pare them down to what's essential, that would probably reduce your post count, post length, and increase the number of replies you get. The flood control would probably aggravate you less as well.

It’s not really the long messages that cause me problems wrt flood control. It’s the short ones. I won’t be able to respond to the scripting thread I created yesterday for, presumably, at least fifteen minutes (IDK the exact number, but it seems to be significantly higher than ten, which makes it by far the most restrictive limit I’ve ever seen on any message board; before then, five was the highest I’d ever seen). My response to that thread certainly won’t take me fifteen minutes to write. Same here; this one certainly didn’t take me fifteen minutes to write. It might’ve taken five. The longer ones usually do take me that long to write.

Obviously, there’s a lot in many of my posts, but TBH, I’m not really expecting most people to read most of them all the way through. I’d estimate probably 90% of my posts are in the Chronicles and Eternal threads, and a lot of those are just notes to myself/Pfhorrest of ideas for future writing/things to fix/etc. I’m not really expecting most people to read them in their entirety, and TBH, until Chronicles gets closer to a final release, I’m not really bothered if most people don’t. Eternal is certainly closer to a final release, but if people are interested in developing for it, they’re going to be interested in developing for it regardless of the length of my posts.

Anyway, I mean, if I have three different threads where people have replied to me, then assuming a fifteen-minute limit, that means it’s going to take at least half an hour to respond to all of them, and considering the first post won’t necessarily be instantaneous, it’ll probably be more. Seems a bit much. I should note that, since I’m heavily involved in three separate projects (YouTube channel, Chronicles, Eternal), that’s not really a hypothetical.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

Since there's pretty much only 3 people involved in all of these discussions, perhaps you guys could find some other way to communicate with each other that doesn't have the flood control problem? Real time conversations are much better when coordinating on a project anyway.

Then you could just occasionally post stuff to the Pfhorums when there's something more relevant to a wider audience. If you're mostly posting notes to yourself or one other person, that certainly qualifies as something not essential for the Pfhorums. It also falls into the category Treellama may have been referring to in order to reduce your post count, and make the flood control less of an issue.

I think I probably will join the Discord this week. I’ve been meaning to do that for awhile, anyway. IDK what Hotline is.

I don’t entirely want to stop the public updates for any of the projects I’m working on, though, since I’m trying to keep the two I control entirely as public-facing as possible, and I think Pfhorrest wants to go down the same route with Eternal. Of course, anyone who’s in a Discord room can see chat logs back awhile (IDK if it’s since the room was founded), so maybe the shift wouldn’t be a huge problem, but AFAIK you actually have to be in the room to see the logs, whereas anyone who wanders onto this site can see it.

Of the three, the YouTube channel needs the fewest updates; I’ve mostly been posting lately when I’ve made new films of my own (though there’s a “Rise Robot Rise” film I haven’t posted about yet because I was exhausted last night when I made it). If I figure out what’s wrong with my SheepShaver setup, I’ll probably start posting more frequently in there.

That said, some of the shorter posts almost certainly wouldn’t be necessary with a Discord room, so it no doubt would still help substantially.

In any case, to put it in perspective, I think the restriction on posts per hour here is either four or five. I understand why the limit is there – I understand intensely well from personal experience how annoying it is to clean up forum spam day after day – but is there some way to set it up so that newcomers have the post limit, but people who have proven they aren’t spammers can post more often? I haven’t adminned a phpBB in close to fifteen years, so IDK what settings are possible on them these days. Alternately, can’t it at least be cut somewhat? Even ten minutes would be a noticeable improvement. It’s not the end of the world if nothing changes, but I think you’d probably see more posts all around if it were lowered. A lot of people don’t have hours to spend online every day, so if they can’t make a second post after five or ten minutes, they might just wander off.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

You should only have a 2 minute wait between posts now, and can bump threads once a day. If this still feels annoying I can create a new "Pfhrequent Poster" group or something with different permissions.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

The Man wrote:Eternal is certainly closer to a final release, but if people are interested in developing for it, they’re going to be interested in developing for it regardless of the length of my posts.

So not true. This is why I posted in the Eternal thread saying basically, "hey what actually is going on?" As much as I'd like to contribute, I don't have time to wade through all those posts to figure out what y'all have / have not done. Similarly, I didn't even know Chronicles was a scenario until you chastised someone in another thread for not mentioning it in a list of active scenarios.

That's not to say long posts are always bad or that I always don't read them - clearly I read the above. I certainly prefer your verbosity to the default inanity of the internet, but once in a while, it'd help to provide a reader's digest version of what you're talking about.

It wasn't clear to me in the Eternal thread that you were wondering where we were in the process.

FWIW we are on the success branch of chapter 2, with me working on "My Kingdom Pfhor A Horse" tonight and Aaron working on the "Corporation" levels this afternoon (?), and then as necessary I'll go over Burning Down The Corporation tomorrow and release beta 2 on Thursday.

I think I might’ve misinterpreted your question. I didn’t realise you were asking what levels were already mostly finished; I read it as a question of what was left to do. Sorry about that.

I think chapter three might be the least likely to have any changes made to it in the immediate future, since I haven’t really worked on most chapter four levels at all and I’m still not satisfied with the monster balance in several chapter five levels, but I must confess I haven’t really been doing much in general in Eternal because I’ve been sprucing up Chronicles’ graphics to the best of my ability.

In the future, if you’re confused about something I’ve written, feel free to just ask. I’m not likely to be bothered unless people are jerks about it.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

Oh, duh. I think I was still expecting you not to get to chapter three until October, which was the original schedule. In any case, I’m mostly done with “Pfhor får lamm” in chapter four. There’s a small platform glitch I haven’t yet fixed and I haven’t standardised the door speeds yet, but I can do those later.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”